


Trigger Finger

by Deastar



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Awesome Jane Foster, Awesome Phil Coulson, BAMF Natasha Romanov, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, POV Clint Barton, POV Natasha Romanov, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 16:11:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1864095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deastar/pseuds/Deastar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint and Natasha, in the aftermath of The Avengers.</p>
<p>  <i>“I’m teaching a self-defense class here at SHIELD.  Ms. Potts, Dr. Foster, Ms. Lewis.” Natasha pauses slightly. “Dr. Banner.” She lets him chew on that for a minute, and then says, “I’d appreciate your help with it.”</i><br/><i>“They benched you to babysit me.” Clint’s mouth tightens. “Shit, Tasha – I don’t need—”</i><br/><i>“I’d appreciate your help,” she repeats, cutting him off without hesitation.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Trigger Finger

**Author's Note:**

> I started this story after The Avengers but before any of the subsequent MCU movies or Agents of SHIELD; Coulson is dead, and nothing that happened in Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, or CA:TWS is a part of this story.
> 
> Content Warnings: This story is, in part, _about_ triggers, and it deals with brainwashing, deprogramming, violence, PTSD, domestic violence, and sexual assault. It also contains a scene with a somewhat graphic depiction of an interaction that a female character is intentionally led to believe is an attempted rape. Both characters remain fully clothed, the female character is not touched sexually, and the scene makes clear that she is never in real danger of sexual assault in this interaction, but it still has the potential to be triggering. I've set it off from the rest of the story with a long line of asterisks (****************) at the beginning and the end, so you can skip it if you need to. Please let me know if you feel these warnings were inadequate.

Clint wakes up slowly, so… _Drugs_ , he thinks, a split second before he notices the restraints. Without opening his eyes, he gauges his surroundings with his other senses. As far as he can tell, he’s lying in a fairly small room, and he’s been left alone there. The room feels off, both familiar and unfamiliar. If he’s been in the room before, he should recognize it, but he doesn’t. His eyes stay closed – even though he’s alone, there could be cameras—

“Welcome back,” Natasha says.

Coulson says—had liked to say that there are two kinds of rooms: rooms that are occupied, and Schrodinger’s rooms, which either have no one in them or have Natasha in them, and you won’t know which until she wants you to. Clint doesn’t beat himself up about not knowing she was there. If he did, he’d be black and blue most days.

Natasha’s sitting in a chair by the side of the bed in her civilian clothes, and as Clint looks around, he realizes why the room seems familiar and unfamiliar at once. It’s Natasha’s room – so, familiar – but there’s an extra bed in it, where Clint is lying right now – so, unfamiliar. There’s a folder open in Natasha’s lap, and the desk lamp is shining down on it like a spotlight.

“What happened?” Clint asks.

Natasha closes the folder and sets it on the desk. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I—” _Fell asleep, dreamed, woke up screaming, fell asleep, dreamed, woke up screaming, fell asleep—_ “I couldn’t sleep,” Clint answers. He thinks back. “I went to the range, but… it wasn’t right, I couldn’t—it felt like I couldn’t _see_. I remember going up on the roof of the range, with my bow, going on watch. I thought it might settle me down.” _I thought I might feel safer there_.

“On the corner of the roof?” Natasha asks, neutral.

“Yeah.”

“You fell asleep there; went over the edge.” She doesn’t have to tell him it looked like a stupid person’s suicide attempt. Probably some people even believed it. She knows that _he_ knows five hundred surer ways to get there.

“What’s the damage?”

“Your hands are fine.” She knows what his priorities are. “You fell into vegetation, so your skull is only bruised. No concussion. You landed on your left side. Three cracked ribs, dislocated shoulder, broken tibia. You’ve been patched up and dosed with the good stuff.”

“No kidding,” Clint says, snorting. He should be feeling like shit that’s been baked in the sun and run over by an 18-wheeler, but instead he just feels a persistent dull ache everywhere. He hesitates before gritting his teeth and asking, “The fallout?”

She crosses her legs and leans back slightly in the chair, keeping eye contact. “Shrink visits bumped up to four times a week. You’re benched for a month at least, maybe more. And you sleep in here, now.”

“In here.” Clint sleeps in his quarters at SHIELD whenever he’s not in the field anyway, so that means… “In your room?”

She nods.

“For how long?”

“Until the shrink decides you’re field-ready again.”

“And what if I decide I don’t like that? What if I want some fucking privacy?”

“Too bad.”

“I’m a grown man, Tasha, I don’t need a nanny.”

“Maybe wait to have this fight until you can get a complete sentence out without slurring your words.”

“This isn’t—I’m not _fighting_ with you—” But he is. Shit. “I’m don’t want to be treated like—” _Damaged goods_ , Clint thinks. But he is. Shit. “Was this your idea?” Clint asks, trying to keep the anger going. Natasha just gives him a slow, steady look.

“That depends what you mean. If you mean, was it my idea to put you under some kind of watch so you don’t fall off a taller roof next time and break your neck, no, that was Director Fury’s idea. If you mean, was it my idea to stash you here with me, as opposed to locking you in a padded room, then yes, that part was my idea.”

Clint looks away. “Thank you,” he mumbles.

Natasha stands up and says, “Go to sleep, Clint. We can keep fighting about it in the morning, if you want.”

“I don’t want to fight with you,” Clint whispers, clenching his eyes shut and trying not to choke on the sudden tightness in his chest. He breathes in, unsteady, and breathes out again. He doesn’t know where she is but he knows she wouldn’t leave. “I just don’t like…” Just don’t like what? _Take your pick_ , Clint thinks: feeling damaged, feeling helpless, feeling like dead weight, being grounded and strapped down and trapped underground here—

Natasha rests her hand on his forehead, and when he opens his eyes, he watches her unbuckle the restraints. “Don’t re-injure that shoulder,” she warns him. He’s an open book to her, and, not for the first time, he finds it weirdly comforting. “Good night, Clint,” she murmurs, flicking off the lamp.

“’Night, Nat.”

Clint closes his eyes, and feels sleep tugging him underwater with strong hands. He’d like to think it’s the drugs—that Tasha and Fury are wrong, that he doesn’t need this—but as he drifts off, his mind wraps itself up in the perfect breathless silence of Natasha’s presence like a cat curled up in a pile of warm straw, and the drugs may make him drowsy, but they sure as hell can’t make him feel safe.

*

Clint can fake sleep very well, but not to Natasha’s eyes. She knows the pattern of _slow breath in, slower breath out_ that marks Clint’s sleep on painkillers, and so she knows as soon as he falls asleep. The drugs mean he’ll sleep through the night, probably for the first time in a week. It won’t last—he hates the drugs almost as much as she does—but for now, the familiar rhythm of it makes her feel steady and sure.

Natasha’s done this twice now, herself. The first time, she had nothing but the memory of a sideways smile and the strange, unexpected feeling that she was grateful to be alive. The second time, she had Clint and Coulson. Coulson sort of knew what he was doing – he’d read every report of her first deprogramming, and conducted his usual high standard of background research. Clint hadn’t – he’d just showed up and let her kick the shit out of him when that was what she needed, and listened to her not-particularly-lucid confessions when that was what she needed, and stood guard outside the door or let her try to seduce him or brought her french fries when that was what she needed. Between the three of them, they’d carved out a space where she could remake herself.

Clint will sleep through the night, and so there’s not really any reason for Natasha not to get some sleep herself, especially given what her nights are likely to look like for the next few weeks. She makes a final perimeter check, clipping the looper onto the SHIELD-installed cameras. Before Hill took over as Fury’s second, Natasha and the security office had staged a private cold war over the surveillance of her quarters – every night, Natasha would attach the looper to the cameras, and every morning, security techs would come in to remove it. As a former field agent herself, Hill understood Natasha’s perfectly healthy paranoia, and Coulson had negotiated an unwritten détente where no SHIELD security agents would enter Natasha’s quarters as long as she removed the looper whenever she left the apartment, or upon request. SHIELD Medical had made the request, tonight.

Coulson is dead, which is an open wound in and of itself, and probably at least twenty-five percent of what put Clint up on that roof. It’s up to Natasha to play both the expert and the game amateur, now. Sitting down on her bed, Natasha sets her silent alarm, then strips off the jeans and top that she’d pulled on when Director Fury called her to his office three hours ago. She has her orders, and as the situation stands, she agrees with them. If a time comes when she does not…

Natasha keeps very careful track of every entry in her ledger, and last week, the last of her debt to Nick Fury was paid with interest. And that was _before_ she’d jumped onto an alien jet ski and used a magic staff of chaos to close a portal to another universe with a nuclear bomb on the other side before standing six feet away from the creature that raped Clint’s mind and killed the first man she’d ever trusted and _did not kill it_. She’s pretty far in the black with Fury now, and if he owes her nothing else, he owes her time. She intends to take it.

*

When Clint comes awake in the morning, the drugs have worn off. “Oh, hell,” he mumbles without opening his eyes. “Oh, fuck _me_.”

Natasha greets him with a quiet, amused, “Good morning, sunshine.”

Clint rolls over on his left side and immediately regrets it – three cracked ribs, no fucking kidding. Flat on his back again, he says, “Don’t suppose you’d kill me. If I asked you real nicely. Just as a favor, you know.”

“Don’t suppose I would,” Natasha agrees, voice coming from somewhere on the floor. “Want drugs?”

Forcing his eyes open – not that it makes much difference underground, it’s still black as hell – Clint ponders that. His ribs, head, shoulder and leg hurt like a motherfucker, but the drugs make his head fuzzy, slow his reactions, make him useless, defenseless…

“I’ve had worse,” he tells her, which is true. She hums an affirmative – he knows how she feels about drugs, too. He’s never seen her willingly consent to take them for anything short of a gunshot wound.

He can hear her getting up from her morning stretches, and a moment later, the overhead light comes on, making him wince. Using his right arm, Clint shoves himself up to a sitting position, resting his back on the wall. “So,” he says. “I fell off a roof.”

“Yes.” Like an echo of the first time he opened his eyes after she beat Loki out of his head, she comes to perch on the side of his bed, hands firmly planted to either side of her hips. Anyone else, he thinks he probably wouldn’t be able to meet their eyes, but Natasha… He never flinched from her jagged edges, and he can’t imagine her flinching now.

Holding her gaze, he says, “That was a stupid thing to do.”

“Yes,” she agrees again.

“And now I’m here with you.”

“Yes.”

“If I’d known this was all it took to get a room upgrade, I’d have—”

“Clint.”

He looks away. “So I’m kind of fucked up, huh?” he whispers.

“That’s not news,” Natasha replies, and Clint can’t help smiling.

“Guess not.”

Natasha rests her hand on his left knee, just above the cast on his lower leg. Probably there’s only one other—probably there’s no one else in the world who’d find any kind of contact between Natasha and their kneecaps comforting, but as they’ve just established, Clint’s kind of fucked up.

“And now I’m stuck here until I can convince the shrinks otherwise,” Clint concludes, glum.

“I’m teaching a self-defense class here at SHIELD. Ms. Potts, Dr. Foster, Ms. Lewis.” Natasha pauses slightly. “Dr. Banner.” She lets him chew on that for a minute, and then says, “I’d appreciate your help with it.”

“They benched you to babysit me.” Clint’s mouth tightens. “Shit, Tasha – I don’t need—”

“I’d appreciate your help,” she repeats, cutting him off without hesitation.

She hasn’t won this one yet, but he asks grudgingly, “What are you teaching them?”

“Evasion and escape, basic hand-to-hand, marksmanship with small arms. I thought you could take care of the last.”

“This is bullshit,” Clint says flatly. “You’re SHIELD’s most valuable asset – you can’t tell me they’re going to have you sit on your ass and teach a bunch of civilians how to walk without falling over—”

“I enjoy the work,” Natasha says, not a ripple in the pond. “You know that. And this is important. The four of them are hostage situations waiting to happen – or worse. Someone has to teach them.”

“And it’s got to be you?”

“I’m here for the next several weeks anyway,” she says, which is an implicit admission that Clint was right, that they benched her to keep an eye on him.

“Next several weeks, huh?”

“As long as it takes,” she replies, her gaze burning into him like a trail of gasoline catching fire.

He looks away.

“You’re valuable, too,” Tasha says, so quiet he might have missed it. It never crosses his mind that she didn’t intend for him to hear every syllable.

Clint clears his throat, and flicks his eyes around the room. “So these are my new digs, huh?”

She allows him the change of subject. “Temporarily, anyway. Have a look around, pace it out. _Don’t_ climb on top of my furniture.”

“Ruiner,” he mutters, swinging his leg over the side of the bed and cringing at the weight of the cast throwing off his balance.

Clint limps around the bedroom, noting the door to the corridor on Natasha’s side of the room, and the door to the rest of the apartment on the north wall. The dents in the carpeting show where all her furniture used to be, before they shoehorned in a bed for him and moved all her stuff around. His clothes and equipment are in a chest at the foot of his bed.

Looking up at the walls, he asks, “Why is the vent cover unscrewed?”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Because I know how you are. You’re welcome.”

Clint doesn’t say anything. He knows her, too—knows what it means that she’s put herself between the door and the place where he’ll be sleeping.

The bedroom connects to a sort of living room with a TV and a couch, also with a door to the corridor, and then the living room opens onto a kitchen, which is sparkling clean. He’s seen this part of the apartment before. Coulson liked to make Natasha watch American movies as “cultural reference points,” and Clint would come and keep her company, shoveling microwave popcorn into his mouth (she always gave the popcorn a sideways look and refused to touch it). In the plaster to the left of the hall door in the living room, there are two bullet holes from the night he’d woken her from a nightmare and she’d recognized him at the last minute, just in time to twitch her aim to one side. He’d have thought SHIELD would have plastered them over. But he knows Natasha wouldn’t have asked. Tasha believes in reminders.

After breakfast, Natasha shrugs on a jacket and grabs a handbag, telling him, “I’m on my way to the shelter.”

“Do you want me to come with? I know C—“ _I know Coulson used to help out_ , he’d started to say. Clint shuts his eyes and takes several slow, shaky breaths in and out. “Fuck,” he says finally. He opens his eyes and repeats, “Fuck. So probably not today, huh?” For some reason, it’s easier for him to admit out loud how fucked up he is right now than it would be to hear her say it. He knows it, he’s not in denial, but he doesn’t want to hear it from her. Stupid, but he’ll cling to what little he can control.

“Next week,” Natasha says. She brushes her hand over one of his own, clenched in a fist at his side. “I’d be glad to have your help.”

Clint nods. “Okay.”

*

At the shelter, Heather looks harried, but that’s nothing new – this line of work doesn’t lend itself to serenity. She says, “Hey, Tanya. We were glad to get your message saying you were coming in. Surprised, but glad.”

Natasha nods. “I’ll probably be in every week for the next month or so.”

“Working on the clean-up?” Heather immediately winces, and says, “Sorry, I know, you can’t talk about your work—”

The shelter, of course, ran a background check on Tanya Romer before allowing her to volunteer there, and so the staff knows that Tanya served 8 years in the Marines and now does highly confidential work for an elite corporate security firm.

“It’s fine,” Natasha replies. “And yes,” she says truthfully, “I’m working on the clean-up.”

In the basement—outfitted as a gym and well-lit by donations that cannot be traced back to any SHIELD employee—Natasha greets her students. “Today, I’m going to teach you how to take a weapon away from an attacker when your attacker is armed with a knife or a firearm, and you are not. I want to be very, very clear that when you are unarmed and your attacker has a weapon, you should run. That should be your first and only strategy. But there may be situations in which you can’t run. Your attacker may have blocked your only route of escape. Or running may mean abandoning someone you feel you cannot leave behind.” One of the women glances over at a little girl reading a picture book in the corner of the gym, and her face is washed with the memory of old fear. “When the fight is uneven and you can’t run, your only choice is to even the fight. That is what I’m going to teach you today.”

***

Natasha isn’t sure how Nick Fury got a Fortune 500 CEO, a disheveled astrophysicist, and a PoliSci major with authority problems into one of SHIELD’s training gyms at 9:00 AM on a Wednesday morning, but she doesn’t need to know. It’s not her job to get them to show up – it’s her job to teach them once they’re there.

Natasha only gets a few lines into her opening spiel before Ms. Lewis interrupts. “Why do you call us all by our last names?” The tone of Ms. Lewis’ voice makes it clear that this is intended to be a complaint. “Did we all get apparated to Hogwarts while I wasn’t looking?”

Natasha raises an eyebrow. “I will call you by your last name because you will call me Agent Romanoff. It seems only fair.”

“I will, will I?” Ms. Lewis says, raising a matching eyebrow.

“You will.”

Dr. Foster jumps in. “And _why_ , exactly, are Darcy and I here? Ms. Potts I understand – she’s a public figure. But I’m just a not-very-well-respected scientist. And Darcy is—no offense, Darcy—a glorified personal assistant to a not-very-well-respected scientist.”

“I won’t argue with the ‘glorified’ part,” Ms. Lewis says, shrugging.

Natasha nods – it’s a fair question. “It’s not a particularly well-kept secret that you two are important to Thor, and that makes you important to the Avengers. A determined operative would not find it _easy_ to uncover that information, but it will come out eventually, and when it does, that makes you two a hostage situation waiting to happen. And Ms. Potts, you already are.”

Ms. Potts objects, “Stark Industries security is very good—”

“You and I already know that it’s not too difficult for an operative to earn a position of trust and gain access to the highest levels of Stark Industries, including personal access to you and to Mr. Stark.”

Potts gives a ironic twist of a smile. “Don’t sell yourself short, Agent.”

Ms. Lewis raises her hand. “Sorry, how do we know that can be done?”

“Because I did it,” Natasha says.

“Whoa.”

Natasha makes a note that saving the world from an invading alien army does not impress Ms. Lewis, but successfully infiltrating Stark Industries apparently does. She supposes that someone who tasered a Norse God into unconsciousness twice is perhaps less impressed by vanquishing aliens than your average research assistant.

She can read the resistance on their faces. “It’s this, or be accompanied everywhere by an armed guard.”

Ms. Potts levels a look at Natasha that would have made a lesser woman flinch. “I strongly suspect that it’s this, and be accompanied everywhere by an undercover armed guard that’s making some attempt at subtlety, or not this, and be accompanied everywhere by a squad of heavily armed gorillas in combat gear.”

Natasha allows herself a hint of a smile. “I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Natasha lets that settle for a moment, and then begins speaking again, making sure to meet and hold each woman’s gaze as she talks. “You should know this. The hostage liability gives me the leverage to _make_ you learn, but you should know this anyway, as human beings in a dangerous world. And particularly as women. Being able to defend yourself is just as much a matter of mental habit as physical skill. I can’t make you martial artists in a month—although I will teach you basic hand-to-hand combat, and I will push you hard—but I can instill habits of thinking and reactive instincts that will help you compensate for your relative lack of combat experience and physical prowess.”

***

It’s late—1 AM—when Natasha returns to her quarters, and she can tell something is wrong from the moment she steps through the door. The air in the suite smells like fear.

In the bedroom, as she expected, Clint is awake.

“Coulson’s dead,” Clint grits out, huddled against the foot of the bed.

“I know,” Natasha says neutrally. She sits down on her own bed and takes off her boots.

“Yeah,” Clint agrees. “You did know. You knew when I woke up, and you let me find out from _Fury_? _After_?”

“What would you have done, if it were me waking up, and you knew he was dead?”

She can see Clint fuming, and she can see that it makes him even angrier when he has to say, “I don’t know.”

“You know how it has to be,” she says quietly. “Mission first. Feelings later.”

“I’m not as good at that as you are, Tasha.” She knows he intends it to hurt, but it’s not like he’s saying anything she hasn’t known since the moment they met.

Still, she doesn’t have to be his punching bag, so she reminds him, “I’ve had a lifetime of practice,” and he flinches. Clint’s childhood wasn’t exactly sunshine and puppies, but he knows enough about her past to know that she wins the “fucked-up backstory” Olympics.

***

Natasha has had bad handlers and good handlers; she’s had handlers who wanted to fuck her, and handlers who treated her like a child, and handlers who thought she was a monster. Coulson was different.

After months of deprogramming and debriefing and sodium pentathol and hypnosis and restraints, the first day Natasha had been given any kind of choice about what to do with her time, she’d been in a small gym in the old HQ, sparring with Clint, a couple of other agents looking on. She’d felt fucking awful, out of shape and slow after months of nothing but solo training under heavy guard; but the looks gradually dawning on the spectators’ faces told her that she didn’t look slow by their standards. Mostly they looked afraid.

When Natasha was wiping the sweat off of her face, a bland-looking man in a suit walked up to her and held out his hand. He introduced himself as “Agent Coulson.” Then his face broke into a kind of incredulous smile that made him look five years younger, and softly he said, “That was beautiful.”

He’d led her to his office and offered her water (which she accepted) and coffee (which she did not). “You were entered in our records as Natasha Romanoff, but I’m guessing that should be Romanova. Of course, I understand that may not be your real name anyway, so—”

“I don’t know my real name,” Natasha said. “I don’t know if I have one.”

“What do you want it to be?”

“Natasha Romanoff is fine.”

“You can take some time to think ab—”

“Natasha Romanoff is fine.”

He paused for a moment, then says. “Okay.” Unruffled, he wrote something down on a form, and told her, “I’ll get you some SHIELD I.D.”

“Thank you.”

Natasha got up to leave, but before she got to the door, Coulson said, “We’re really thrilled to have you here. You have an amazing talent.”

She turns back and meets his gaze head-on. “I’ve killed hundreds and hundreds of people. I don’t even know how many, and I don’t care. Some of them were children.”

“You won’t have to do that, here,” he said, in such a way that she knew he meant “children” not “killing.” Even that made her stop just short of rolling her eyes.

“You won’t,” he repeated, and she still didn’t believe it, but she was pretty sure he did, and that was something. Maybe. “You shouldn’t have to do that. You’re better than that.”

She waited long enough to tell him she wasn’t impressed, then asked, “May I go?”

“Yes. Thank you, Ms. Romanoff.”

***

For the first self-defense lesson in which Dr. Banner will be joining the women, Natasha brings in a box full of household objects. This was the first self-defense lesson she’d taught at the shelter, and it’s still the one she finds most satisfying. Before her students arrive, Natasha spreads the items out around the floor of the gym – a bottle of bleach here, the desk lamp a little farther away, the wire coat hanger in the center. Against the east wall, she sets the bag of flour and stares at it for a moment. Coulson doesn’t have a grave yet. Maybe he never will. But if he does, it’s not flowers she’ll leave by his headstone. She thinks he’d like the pun, and he always loved helping her teach this lesson at the shelter.

The lesson goes a little faster than it normally does – Ms. Lewis in particular has a special gift for finding the dangerous potential in the least-likely items. She has to push Dr. Foster, and especially Dr. Banner, a little more to get them to list ways that each item could be used as a weapon, but they get into the spirit of the exercise, and by the end, all four students are enjoying themselves. This lesson is good for instilling habits of thought, but it’s also good for building rapport among the class, and she’s pleased to see that it works with a small class just as well as it does in her bigger classes down at the shelter.

At the end of the lesson, Dr. Banner hangs back. Natasha finishes loading the objects into the box, staying quiet. As she picks up the box and heads for the door, he says, “Your brain does that—does this—all the time. Constantly.” It’s not a question. “You’re always thinking about… how you could hurt people.”

Natasha holds his gaze for a long moment, and says, “Yes.”

He takes that in, rubbing his thumb over a spot on the opposite wrist. Finally he says, “Huh,” and adds awkwardly, “Thank you,” before turning and walking through the open door.

***

Clint’s SHIELD-issue therapist is staring at him – he tried to wait her out, the first couple of weeks, but she is just as stone-cold as you’d imagine a SHIELD therapist would have to be, and he doesn’t try that anymore.

“Natasha and I are cuddling,” Clint manages.

Dr. Krishnamurthy lifts an eyebrow. “If you mean that metaphorically, I _am_ aware that you are under Agent Romanoff’s supervision after hours, and that includes sleeping in her room. If you mean it literally…” She delicately lets the sentence hang there.

“I mean it literally. Like, in the same bed. But not in a sex way. And not—not every night.”

“And how does Agent Romanoff feel about that?” That was not the question that Clint was expecting, and it throws him for a loop. He thinks about it for a minute, and then another. At a certain point, he’s got to admit, “I have no fucking clue.”

Dr. Krishamurthy waits in polite silence.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how _I_ feel about it?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to tell me how you feel about it?”

“Not really.”

Which is probably as good as admitting he doesn’t know how he feels about it, either. He gets the impression she didn’t miss that. But all she does is smile and say, “Well, there you go.”

“So you’re only going to ask me about things I want to tell you about?”

Dr. Krishnamurthy raises her eyebrow again, then smiles broadly. “I don’t think I said that.”

“Shit.”

“Indeed.”

***

In the dark, in Natasha’s bed, Clint grits out, horrified, “I told him _everything_ about you,” but her arms around him only hold on tighter. He doesn’t deserve this, not any of this.

“You didn’t tell him about the shelter,” Natasha says, placating, but Clint can’t even let her have that.

“I—no, I did – and I’m sorry—” he starts, wretched.

She waves his apology off, but holds herself still, saying only, “Hmm.”

“Why’d you think…”

“Oh, he accused me of thinking I could—could clean my ledger just by saving you. He said it wasn’t enough as if he thought I didn’t know. A child praying in the dark, tying a piece of string around my finger like it would keep the demons away…” She collects herself, and he can feel her pushing it down. “So I thought you hadn’t told him.”

“I did.” Clint thinks, trying to work it through. Natasha turns her head to look at him, and he catches the smell of her hair, just for a second. “I guess he didn’t believe it. That’s all I can think. That he thought you didn’t mean it.”

“I can believe that,” Tasha says, voice contained. “I can believe it would have seemed very… foreign, and ridiculous, to him. That a killer would put in the slow hours doing one small thing over and over, instead of trying to win absolution in a blaze of destruction and glory. He was a big-gestures kind of guy.”

“Like Stark.”

“Mm. Yes and no. Stark can put in the time on the drudgework, when he needs to. When it matters to him.”

He nods. She never doubts his shooting, and he never doubts her read, especially of people she’s been watching as long as she’s been watching Stark.

***

When Dr. Banner shows up for his fourth hand-to-hand lesson, he comes prepared with a long list of reasons why he should really be sparring with Rogers instead, or with Stark, or with any number of Stark Industries security personnel that Stark had recommended to him, all of whom are men. Natasha listens carefully to his reasons, and waits for him to finish. Then she holds eye contact with him, and says, “You spar with _me_ ,” quietly but firmly.

“Why?” he asks – his voice holds nothing but mild curiosity, but Natasha knows what’s simmering underneath.

“For the same reason I make Ms. Potts, and Ms. Lewis, and Dr. Foster spar with Agent Barton at least some of the time. If someone ever does come for one of those women, they will likely send men.” She pauses, not out of hesitation, but to give him time to prepare himself to hear this. “I’ve read your file,” she says, which will not surprise him. “And anyone who comes after you will have read it, too. And if they have even half a brain, they’ll send women, if they can. Because they know you will hesitate. Even if it’s just for a split second.”

“I have to—”

“No,” Natasha cuts him off, calmly. “You have to trust yourself. You have to trust yourself to know the difference between hitting a woman in combat and hitting a woman who loves you. The impulse is good. It is. But it could worse than kill you.” She doesn’t have to define ‘worse.’ She and Banner are alike in that – they don’t fear death. Weapons fear the hand that wields them.

Banner thinks that through – it doesn’t take long. He’s a quick study, which is one of the reasons she finds herself pulling more than just the usual satisfaction from the teaching. The other reason—

“And it’s not because of _your_ fear.” Always polite, Banner makes it a statement, not a question. But it’s in his eyes.

“I’d be pretty screwed if I had to spar with the people I fear, to get over it,” Natasha says, bland. “Most of the people I’ve been scared of are dead.”

Banner takes another second to absorb that. “Fair point.” He half-smiles, and doesn’t push, which is why Natasha says, “It does help. I wouldn’t put you through this if that were all. But it helps.”

“I’m glad,” he replies. They stand in silence for a moment.

***

“Are you in love with Agent Romanoff?” Dr. Krishnamurthy asks.

Clint blinks. “ _Yes_ ,” he says, in a tone of voice that implies the word _obviously_. The doc is all over that, of course.

“You say that like it should be obvious to me,” she notes, eyes crinkling at the corners.

Clint wants to say, _Have you_ met _her?_ Instead, he shrugs and says, “Isn’t it in my file or something?”

“No,” Dr. Krishnamurthy tells him, looking very interested, which is probably a bad sign, “it’s not in your file. Should it be?”

“Why are you asking me about this? I have trauma. I have flashbacks.”

“Working for SHIELD, I hear a lot about trauma and flashbacks.” She waves a hand disinterestedly. “But I don’t hear a lot about romance, so spill, Agent Barton.”

“I don’t think that’s very professional.”

“I don’t try to do your job, you don’t try to do mine.”

Clint’s pretty sure he’s been in love with Natasha since he was born. It’s a fact in his life, like gravity and wind resistance and momentum. It lives in his body. When he pulls back his bowstring, he loves her. When he runs for cover, feet pounding, he loves her. When he blinks the flash of an explosion out of his eyes, he loves her. He just does. He figures he probably always will.

He’s never told her, but obviously she knows. And he’s never made anything out of it, for a lot of reasons, some bullshit, some not. The ones that lasted this long were that she was too good for him, that they had something working and he didn’t want to fuck it up, and that it would have felt wrong even if she’d wanted him back, him and Natasha having something and Coulson not in it with them. If it could have been the three of them, it might have happened. But Coulson had principles, and he and Natasha both knew it, and that was the end of that.

She’s still too good for him. And they’ve still got something good. And he—nothing has changed that much. He’s going to get back to normal. Everything is going to get back to normal. That’s how he’ll know it’s finally over and everything’s all right. If he fucks with this, he won’t get normal ever again. Everything can’t have changed. It can’t be that far gone. He can fucking deal as long as it’s not that far gone.

“Is Agent Romanoff in love with _you_?” Dr. Krishnamurthy asks.

“Natasha doesn’t really…” How does he say this? “To Natasha, emotions are—” Clint pulls up short. “No. I’m not telling you about Natasha. You ask me about me, I have to tell you, but I’m not—”

Dr. Krishnamurthy holds up a hand. “Understood.” She tilts her head. “I won’t ask you to tell me things about Agent Romanoff that you think she wouldn’t want me to know. But I have seen the interrogation video.”

Clint’s face must show his confusion.

“The video of Agent Romanoff’s interrogation of Loki,” the doc elaborates. “Have you seen it?”

“No.”

Clint can see her saving that one for later, but all she says is, “In it, Loki asks Agent Romanoff if she loves you.”

Clint manages not to throw up at the mention of Loki’s name in the same sentence at Natasha’s, which is probably some kind of progress.

“She says, ‘Love is for children.’”

Clint huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, that sounds like Tasha.”

“Do you think that’s true? You don’t have to answer if you feel it’s betraying a confidence.”

“Do I think Natasha thinks that way? Yes. I know she does. Natasha’s not a robot, she feels real things. I’m… important to her. Coulson was important to her. She likes Dr. Banner, even though I think she’d rather not.”

“But…”

“Look, that’s all I’m going to say.”

“You already carry a lot of guilt about telling Natasha’s secrets.”

Clint hadn’t made that connection consciously, but yeah, now that she points it out. He guesses that’s why she makes the big bucks. “Yeah,” he admits.

***

Natasha knows that there is a video recording of her interrogation of Loki, and she's had several weeks to adjust to the idea that everyone who interacts with her has probably seen it - particularly anyone who lives in Stark Tower, sharing space with one of the most intrusive and technologically gifted men in the world. What takes her off-guard is how many people, given the chance, _haven't_ seen it.

Cleaning up the gym after a lesson, she asks Dr. Banner about it. “At first I didn’t watch the video because… I don’t like torture.” Whatever Dr. Banner sees on Natasha’s face—probably nothing—makes him shake his head wryly and say, “I know, you couldn’t physically touch him, but I assumed that wasn’t the only tool in your toolbox. But then Tony watched it…”

Natasha asks dryly, “Because he does like torture?”

Dr. Banner’s mouth twitches, but he stays serious. “Because he doesn’t understand the concept of boundaries like a normal person. And after he watched it, he said—he told me not to watch it. And Steve, and Pepper. He said it was… private. That he didn’t think you’d want us to see.”

That’s not what Natasha expected to hear – oh, she knows Stark is capable of it, but she didn’t expect to wind up on his list of people whose boundaries he can actually be moved to respect.

Tentatively, Dr. Banner says, “He could… he could delete it. I’m pretty sure, anyway.”

Natasha shakes her head immediately. “Please tell him not to do that.”

“Why?”

“Because Loki will be back someday, and the video might contain something useful.”

The two of them continue folding up the gym mats in silence.

Dr. Banner says, “You really think he’ll be back.”

“I know he will.” Natasha finishes stacking the mats and leans against the wall. “I know his kind.” _Our kind – tricksters and liars, death-lovers, puppet-masters. The things in the dark that will get you whether you’re good or not_. “They can’t be made safe.”

“Then what can you do with them?” Dr. Banner asks.

“Turn them to other ends, or kill them while you have the chance.”

“But you let Loki go to be imprisoned,” he points out.

Natasha shrugs. “Not my call.”

“You would have killed him?”

“He’s too dangerous to try to turn, probably. Of course, that’s what they thought about me.”

Dr. Banner looks taken aback, a little. “After what he’s done—”

“If you count the fatalities caused by the Chitauri, his body count probably tops mine. But if you count only the deaths he caused directly…” Natasha doesn’t let her gaze so much as flicker. “He’s a baby.”

She gives Dr. Banner a while to absorb that, before continuing, “But yes, if the choice were mine, I would have killed him. He hurt Clint. And he’s crazy, and you can’t turn crazy.”

***

Natasha's employers had been very specific about the result they expected. And so she had lined up the shot, sighting down the barrel through the gap in the window, breathed in and begun to squeeze the trigger—

But Han bent over suddenly, ducking down below her line of sight. Before Natasha had time to blink, he straightened up, his five-year-old daughter in his arms, a wide smile on his face.

Natasha was very familiar with the effect of every type of bullet at every possible range on every possible part of the human body. At this distance, her bullet would have sent a spray of blood, bone, and brain flying for at least a foot in every direction. Han stood still, holding some kind of conversation, play-solemn, with the girl. Natasha had the shot.

Natasha inhaled slowly and stayed motionless on the ledge. She ignored the queasy feeling of exposure simmering in the pit of her stomach. The patrol wouldn’t come by for another 180 seconds. Inside the room, Han kissed his daughter’s cheek. He lifted his eyes to the doorway, and the au pair walked into Natasha’s field of view. Han handed his daughter to the au pair, waving as she turned and walked away. Natasha breathed in on a slow count to five, checked her aim, and fired.

Four hours later, in a shitty hotel room in Seoul, Natasha was standing in front of an arrow.

Moving very slowly, Natasha set her gun on the floor and straightened up again. The point of Barton’s arrow never wavered.

“You were sent to kill me,” Natasha said.

Completely casual, Barton replied, “Yes.”

“You could.”

“Yeah, I could,” Barton said. There’s a note in his voice that tells her that it’s just beginning to dawn on him that there might be something sideways there. “But I’m pretty sure that would be a hell of a waste.”

Ah. That, Natasha understood. He wanted to use her. She was accustomed to that. But she was tired of it—too tired. She’d let Barton catch her because she thought he’d be better. Perhaps she could still get him to do what she wanted. “I will not work for you,” she said clearly.

Barton didn’t seem bothered. “I don’t want you to work for me. I’d make a terrible boss. I want you to work for SHIELD.”

That surprised her. SHIELD had a reputation – not for virtue, but for a persnickety concern about its own virtue. “I don’t think SHIELD wants someone with my kill list.”

“You’re more than your kill list,” Barton replied, and, horribly, there was something like compassion in his eyes.

Natasha let out an incredulous laugh. “Are you honestly trying to save me, Barton? You want to ‘take me away from all this?’” she asked, almost grinning. “Listen to me, little boy – I am not misunderstood. I am not a tragic antihero. I am not waiting for someone to bring me to Jesus. I am the thing under your bed at night. I know you were watching me on this mission. I know you saw me kill Han. For no better reason than that he was in my employer’s way, and they paid me to do it.”

Steadily, Barton said, “Yeah. I watched you on that mission. I watched you line up the shot. And then I watched you hesitate.” He shrugged. “You had the shot. But you waited for the daughter to leave.”

Natasha could hardly believe what she was hearing. “And so I’m a white knight.”

“And so you’re not a sadist. That’s as far as I’ll go. But it’s enough.”

***

It was bound to happen some time. Natasha stays perfectly still, controlling her breathing, and never lets her eyes so much as flicker from the sight of Dr. Banner, crouched on the floor of the gym, doing battle against himself. He’d come in with a storm cloud over his head, and she hadn’t hit him any harder than she usually does, but she knows there’s more to his transformations than just the sensation of physical pain.

After Banner’s eyes fade to their normal brown—after the danger has mostly passed, as much as it ever passes for people like them—he staggers over to the wall and collapses. Now that Natasha is pretty sure she’s not about to be ripped limb-from-limb, she presses the stand-down sequence on her communicator to tell Maria that the situation is under control, and locks the doors of the gym. Then she walks over to the far wall, where Dr. Banner is still sitting.

Banner’s head is buried in his hands, and his whole body is shaking with slow, dry shudders. He’s not a small man, but he looks small now, back to the wall, shoulders pulled in and knees pulled up.

Natasha sits beside him. “In the interrogation, I told Loki that I owed Clint a debt,” she begins, voice as low and calm as she can make it. “I told him that Clint was sent to kill me.” _That_ gets Banner’s attention. He doesn’t lift his head, but his spine straightens and his shaking subsides just the smallest bit. “That Clint was sent to take me out, but he made a different call.”

She breathes in time with Banner’s breathing, in and out.

Eventually, he asks, “Is that true?”

“Nothing is free. Information least of all.”

Banner continues to shake, but he’s focused on her, now, not on his own fear.

“What happened?”

There are many ways Natasha could answer that, but she knows what he’s asking.

“Have you heard of ‘suicide by cop’?”

“Yes.”

She waits for him to get it, and he doesn’t take long. “Suicide by Hawkeye,” he says.

Natasha nods.

Banner whispers, “Why?” He still won’t look at her, but that doesn’t concern her.

“The organization that had created me was gone. I was killing because it was all I knew, for people I despised, too far in to start over.” Breathe in, breathe out. “I got low. Didn’t see a way out.” She can see that one hit home. “Clint wasn’t the first, but he was the first who wasn’t such a fucking incompetent that I refused to die on general principle. I thought I could live with being killed by Clint.” Natasha can smile about this now. “It didn’t take.”

When Banner finally looks up at her, the question he asks isn’t the one she’s expecting. He says, “Does Agent Barton know all this?”

Natasha just nods.

“That must be scary,” he says softly.

“Sometimes,” she acknowledges.

“Do you... need anything?” Banner asks, abruptly. “Like better… knives, or an invisibility suit or some kind of… robot to spar with, you know what, this is stupid, I have no idea what it is you actually do, or want, or anything.”

Natasha quirks an eyebrow at him, amused, and Banner gives her a rueful look. “This is how Tony deals with feelings,” he explains. “He makes things for people – designs them, invents them. That’s how he says, ‘Thank you,’ or ‘I like you,’ basically. And I think it’s starting to rub off on me.”

“Thank you,” Natasha says, deadpan. “I like you, too.” She means it, she realizes, which would normally be pretty unusual—a natural inclination to like other human beings is something of a liability for an assassin—but this whole Avengers Initiative shitshow has introduced her to a lot of people she’s unintentionally wound up liking more than she expected. She’s making her peace with it. Gradually.

Banner makes his standard, unassuming shrug-with-sideways-head-tilt that generally signifies emotion he doesn’t care to verbalize, and avoids eye contact.

***

Dr. Foster is having the problem that many of Natasha’s female students have, at some point – the fear of their own strength, their own potential for violence. Natasha thinks about the problem for a moment, then says, “Pretend I’m your undergraduate thesis advisor.”

Shock flickers across Dr. Foster’s face. “How do you know ab—” She cuts herself off, and after a moment, half-smiles. “Spy, got it.”

“Hit me,” Natasha repeats.

“I never wanted to hit him,” Dr. Foster says as she squares off. “I just wanted to light his office on fire.”

But she hits, and Natasha blocks it. “Good. Harder this time.”

Dr. Foster obeys, and it is harder this time. “Good. Maintain that amount of force, but move faster.”

“Does he still teach there?”

Natasha blocks. “Yes. Even faster.”

Dr. Foster improves her speed, but the force falls off, and Natasha tells her so. “You don’t seem surprised,” Natasha notes, blocking. “Good. Now deliver that same punch five times in a sequence. Go.”

Her rhythm is steady, and Natasha uses a different block with each hit, showing Dr. Foster how it feels to have her force diverted in different directions.

“Tenure,” Dr. Foster says, shrugging while she shakes out her hand. “You’ve pretty much got to physically assault somebody or paint a racial slur on your office door, and sometimes not even then. There’s no exception for just being a condescending asshat.”

“Does your hand actually hurt?” Natasha asks.

Dr. Foster frowns. “No, now that you mention it. I guess I’m just not used to using it that way.”

***

Natasha is walking away from the command center after a meeting with Maria when she hears someone call, “Agent Romanoff?”

Natasha turns around – it’s Rogers, looking a little bashful. “Captain.”

“Could I talk to you, just for a minute? I… have a request.”

Natasha’s face is as smooth as always, but she would admit to at least a drop of curiosity.

“Of course, Captain.” She leads him to an empty office, then prompts, “You had a request?”

“I… heard you and Agent Barton are teaching hand-to-hand combat to Dr. Banner and Miss Potts— _Ms_. Potts,” he corrects himself. “I was wondering if the class had room for one more.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow, and Rogers blushes. “I’ve… run out of punching bags.”

“I heard something about that,” Natasha says, permitting herself a small smile before asking, “Do you have any teaching experience?”

Looking taken aback, Rogers stammers, “N-no. But I didn’t mean I wanted to take over – I really just want to get in some practice, and to learn from you, and from Agent Barton…”

“You’re too good to spar with the women or with Dr. Banner, and too strong even if you weren’t,” Natasha tells him. “Best case scenario, you’d knock them flat in five seconds every time. Worst case scenario, you’d hurt them.”

“Oh,” Rodgers says, deflating. “I understand. Thank you for—”

“SHIELD open sparring is in the main gym at two o’clock on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends.”

“Oh!” Surprise makes Rogers look more his soul’s age and less his body’s. “That’s—”

“Clint and I also have a regularly scheduled private sparring session, on Wednesday nights.”

“I don’t want to intrude…”

“It used to be the three of us. Me, Clint, and—Coulson. Maria joins us whenever she’s in town, and Director Fury drops by occasionally. Other SHIELD agents with… advanced skills… stop in when their schedules permit, or when their handlers think they’re in danger of getting cocky. It wouldn’t be intruding.”

“Thank you. I’d be honored to join you.”

***

In the dark, in Natasha’s bed, Clint protests, “ _You_ don’t use physical torture—”

“No, I don’t,” Natasha agrees. “Do you know why?”

“No…”

“Because all it gets you is unreliable information and nightmares full of screaming. Do you know how I know that?”

Clint doesn’t have to think about it. “Experience,” he admits.

“Experience,” she confirms.

After a moment, Clint says, “That doesn’t mean I’m not a monster. It just means we’re monsters together.”

“You don’t have to find that comforting.”

He does, actually. Damn it. “I still can’t sleep with you in here.” Not with her still body in his sightline; not without the creeping dread that the nightmares have come true.

“I’ll wait outside,” Natasha says, in a voice that brooks no argument.

When Clint leaves in the morning for his workout, he finds her curled up in a blanket on the floor outside the door. She obviously can’t be asleep, with all the noise he made getting dressed, so he pokes her until she opens her eyes and glares.

“You can go back to bed,” he tells her. “Martyr.”

“You are such an ungrateful piece of shit,” she grumbles, pulling the blanket around her shoulders and marching past him into the bedroom.

Clint leans through the bedroom doorway and watches her, hair a mess, strip out of her sleep clothes and burrow under the covers in her underwear. “Thank you,” he says, because he trained himself not to say “I love you” a long time ago, even if she can tell he’s saying it anyway.

***

Clint shuts the door of Dr. Krishnamurthy’s office behind him, and has the sudden feeling he’s being watched. Before he can turn around, he hears a voice say, “Did you miss me, _Clinton_?”

Clint freezes for a minute, surprised. Then his face splits with a big grin. “Oh, it’s you.” Clint turns around, eyes wide with fake surprise. “I didn’t notice you were gone, _Roberta_.”

“I leave you alone on this coast for three measly years,” Bobbi says, arms crossed and toe tapping, unimpressed. “And when I come back, the whole city of New York looks like the end of a Jenga game. Isn’t there any fucking adult supervision on that flying deathtrap?”

Clint opens his mouth and Bobbi points a finger at him with a dangerous look.

“Nick Fury _does not_ count as adult supervision. I heard what he did with that rocket launcher.”

There’s nothing funny about the fact that Clint is responsible for the destruction of a major metropolitan area and thousands of deaths, but Bobbi’s always been able to make him laugh in the face of the deepest piles of shit he’s ever seen. He can’t keep his game face on – it was pointless even to try.

“I did miss you, Bobbi,” he admits, looking at the ground.

“Yeah, well.” When he chances a look up, Bobbi looks awkward. “I… you know. Same.”

“You said you wouldn’t be a stranger,” Clint says, then winces at how pathetic he sounds.

Bobbi shrugs. Now it’s her turn to look at the floor. “Clean break, Birdbrain. You know that.”

*

A year or so before Clint aimed an arrow at Natasha’s eye and didn’t fire, he’d tried for Coulson. He hadn’t thought that way about guys before starting at SHIELD, but Bobbi had always joked that spies and assassins were all bisexual: on the clock, you were orders-sexual – you fucked who they told you to fuck – and off the clock, you were trust-sexual – you fucked only the people you knew you could trust. It was usually a pretty short list, and Coulson was on Clint’s. After Bobbi flew away and didn’t look back, Coulson was the _only_ person on the list. Clint never gave him a real reason for making a different call on Natasha—for bringing home a living woman instead of a belt buckle trophy—and Coulson never asked. Clint always wondered if he knew how much of it was just because Clint was—lonely. He’ll never have the chance to ask.

*

Halfway through her second deprogramming, Natasha had slipped past the guards, hacked the security systems, and picked the locks; she didn’t really know where she was going until she got there, and walked through the door of Coulson’s office without knocking.

“I didn’t know they’d let you out yet,” Coulson said, looking remarkably sanguine for someone with a not-entirely-deprogrammed assassin in his office.

“I let myself out.”

“Tasha…”

Natasha leaned down and kissed him, the way she knew he would like – lush, deep and slow but not dirty, eyes closed, the smallest thread of a moan escaping from the back of her throat. She always knew how men wanted her to kiss them, but he didn’t kiss back.

She pulled back, met his eyes.

“I’m your supervisor,” he said.

She climbed off of him until she was standing a foot in front of him – she thought hard, studying his face.

“But you want me,” she said, and if she’d been in her right mind, she’d have been appalled at how plaintive she sounded.

He said evenly, “I do.”

“So—”

“But I don’t want to sleep with you more than I want to be worthy of your trust.”

She stared at him. In a detached, empty sort of way, she noticed she was starting to shake.

“Tasha,” he said – she didn’t know what it meant. He stood up and wrapped an arm around her, gently pulling her to sit next to him on the low table where he usually kept stacks of mission reports, shoving them onto the floor. His arm stayed wrapped around her, and she let her head fall onto his shoulder. He held her for—she didn’t know how long. It felt like a long time, but it probably wasn’t. The office was dim and shadowy, and it felt like seeing a person lying asleep in bed, when she had only ever seen them awake before. When the shakes had mostly died down, and the detachment, blue and burning like frostbite, had mostly faded, she turned her head just an inch and laid a kiss over his pulse.

“Still your supervisor,” he said, without heat.

Natasha kept her eyes closed. “It was worth a try.”

“Funny,” Coulson replied, and she could feel the slight shift in the skin and muscles of his jaw that meant he was smiling. “That’s what I said about you.”

“How’d that go?” Clint had asked when she’d told him about it, later on.

“It didn’t,” Natasha answered, in a tone of voice that, on anyone else, would be grumpy.

“I could have told you, if you’d asked,” Clint said, condescending.

Natasha raised an eyebrow at him, and graced him with a wicked little grin. “Yes, well… I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a little better-looking than you are, Barton.”

***

Natasha is pleased to see Rogers show up precisely on time for the next open sparring. He’s kind enough to pretend not to notice the other agents gawping at him as he finds her on the mats, stretching next to Clint. “So how does this work?” Rogers asks, looking slightly out-of-place here in SHIELD’s crowded main gym, but game.

Natasha tilts her head. “What do you mean?”

“I never really… got the chance to train _with_ people, you know, _against_ people before. That’s why all the… the punching bags. After the serum, I was too strong – I didn’t always know my own strength, and even when I knew it, I couldn’t always control it, with the blood pumping and the adrenaline—” Natasha nods, and Steve shakes his head. “Anyway. It wasn’t really safe for me to spar with other people, so I trained on my own and tried to rely on the combat training I’d done before the serum. I haven’t had a sparring match I actually thought I had any chance of losing since then.”

“Funny,” Natasha says, lips quirking, “I could say the same thing.”

Rogers looks at her with something new in his eyes. “You could, couldn’t you?”

“Clint always gives me a good workout, I don’t have to be afraid I’ll really hurt him, and he even wins sometimes. But…”

“But he’s the only one.”

“But he’s the only one,” Natasha agrees. “And at the end of the day, I’m still better than he is. He’s good. But I’m better.”

“Are you better than a super-soldier?” Rogers asks, with a teasing glint in his eyes that Natasha has never seen before.

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Natasha replies, a slow smile spreading across her face.

The moment hangs between them, and Natasha feels anticipation building in the pit of her stomach. She asks, “Do you need to stretch?” but he shakes his head, so she leads him out into an open area of mats. “Have you seen ‘The Matrix’ yet?”

He frowns, confused. “Yes…”

Natasha widens her stance, extends her arms, and makes a beckoning motion with her right hand.

When he gets it, he grins, bows to her – then it’s on. He sends a rocket of a punch right for her gut, and she leaps, resting a hand on his shoulder just long enough to glide past his head and jab her heel into his spine on the way. Any man, even Clint, would usually be just a fraction too slow in turning around to face her, giving her an opportunity for kick to the kidney, but the serum made him _fast_ , not just strong; he beats her there, parrying her kick easily.

Natasha has seen him fight, so she knows what to expect: reliance on reach, power, and speed; no influence from the Asian or South American disciplines; a boxing-based approach that’s distinctly un-showy. She lets him chase her around the mat for a while so she can gauge her tactics, flipping backward out of the way of his fists. His punches are dangerous, and he doesn’t pull them, even when he’s aiming for her face – gratifying and unusual. He treats her with more respect than most of the supposedly “enlightened” modern men she’s fought over the years.

*

Clint analyzes the fight, trying to figure out Natasha’s angle. She can’t strangle or choke Rogers – he’ll just peel her off of his throat or his back as easily as he’d peel an orange. Usually she’s the fastest person in the fight, so she can just dodge and run, and tire her opponent out until he gets slow or makes stupid mistakes, but not here. She’ll get tired before Rogers would. She can’t wear him down with a hundred small injuries, because he’ll have healed the first one by the time she gets the fifth one in. She has three options: try to get him up against a wall and bash his head into it until he’s woozy, if she can get him to stay still that long; decide that ‘winning’ just means lasting longer than anybody else could; or—

Natasha tries a leg sweep that’s too high and leaves her open to a blow from Rogers – it hits her hard enough to send her flying back into the crowd of SHIELD agent spectators, knocking them down like bowling pins. Natasha ignores the shouts of surprise and vaults back into the fight, starting high with a flying kick and then working her flexibility advantage by ducking Rogers’s fists and aiming low. She’s getting faster and faster, matching his super-speed, serious now; the two of them are exchanging hits so fast their arms are a blur, drawing closer and closer together until they look like a cyclone. Closer, closer—Natasha hits left-right, knocking Rogers’s arms back and away, and in that split-second opening, Clint blinks. When he opens his eyes again, there’s an inch between Rogers’ left eye and the Glock in Natasha’s right hand.

It’s completely still for a second, and then another second. Then Rogers grins.

“I may not look it anymore,” he says, “but I’ve been beat enough to know it when I see it.”

Natasha’s mouth quirks up in a tiny smile, and she lowers the gun; as she and Rogers shake hands, someone starts clapping, and the rest of the SHIELD personnel pick it up. People are applauding, whistling, cheering like they just saw… well, like they just saw the world’s two most dangerous hand-to-hand fighters put on an exhibition match six feet from their noses.

*

“Thanks for the loan,” Natasha says, handing the gun back to an agent she knows only from his personnel file.

Peter Choi (32 years old, two kids adopted with partner of seven years, Stanford-educated), smiles at her as he carefully takes his sidearm from her hands and holsters it. “Please. It was my honor.”

Natasha blinks. She doesn’t get caught wrong-footed very often, but it honestly didn’t occur to her that he would take it so well. Half the field agents at SHIELD joined up in the first place because they wanted to be Captain America when they were kids, and she’d just stolen his gun so that she could win a fight against their wholesome American hero by cheating. _Shit_ , she thinks, while she says something charming and polite to Agent Choi, _How did that happen?_

People are still clapping, still cheering, and Natasha doesn’t really understand it, but most of these agents haven’t smiled or laughed in weeks, so she takes it for the morale boost it is. She finds Maria at the edge of the crowd and tilts her head at the cheering section, lifting an eyebrow inquisitively.

Maria gives her a _What?_ look, and Natasha frowns slightly. “Captain America lost,” she says. “And I cheated. So why…”

Maria shakes her head. “Captain America is Captain America,” she allows. “But you’re one of us. I don’t think people would be any more excited if you lost and he won. They just wanted to see something amazing. And I think they all know that they did.”

Rogers comes up from behind Maria and offers Natasha his hand again; amused, she shakes it a second time.

“That was fun,” he says. “I’d like to do that again sometime.”

“I would, too,” Natasha agrees, because it _was_ fun. “Maybe next time you’ll even win,” she teases, and Rogers blushes.

“I’m getting better,” Rogers admits, without pride. “But if you had the serum, you’d have put me down for the count in ten seconds flat.”

Natasha grins. “Don’t sell yourself short. I’d put you at twenty, at least.”

“I guess I better just be grateful that all the serum is gone,” Rogers replies, eyes twinkling.

“Mm.” Banner wasn’t the first to try to duplicate the serum, and he won’t be the last. Eventually one of them will get it right. In Rogers’ file, Dr. Erskine’s notes said that the serum amplified everything about a person – it made Schmidt more power-mad and callous, amplified Rogers’ selflessness and bravery. Natasha wonders, for the first time, what it would make her.

***

Natasha slightly regrets telling Rogers about SHIELD open sparring when he arrives the next Tuesday with Tony Stark in tow. When Natasha delicately—all right, not that delicately—inquires about what the hell Stark is doing there, he rolls his eyes. “Well, thanks to you, I’m in serious danger of having my ass handed to me by my girlfriend _and_ my BFF-slash-roommate three times a week, so I thought I better brush up.”

“We’ll be happy to get you into shape,” Rogers says with a grin that would be at home on Natasha’s face, and he shoots her a conspiratorial look, but Natasha’s got other things on her mind.

“Stark, can I speak with you for a minute?” The question is a formality – she’s already got a hand wrapped around his arm, pulling him away from the group.

“Uh-oh,” Stark says, looking faux-contrite, “you’re not gonna give me detention, are you, Miss Romanoff? I could bring you a shiny red apple—”

“You’re sparring with Banner?”

“Yes,” he says flatly, cutting the bullshit. “Is that a problem?”

“I refuse to believe that you don’t know that _no one_ is permitted to train Banner except me, or Agent Barton when I’m on assignment—”

“As a matter of fact, I _did_ know th—”

“Then what the hell do you think you’re—”

“He deserves to be able to spar with someone who’s not shit-terrified of him every time he fucking _blinks_ ,” Tony snaps, angry enough that he forgets who she is and gets in her space – he remembers a second later, and steps back with gratifying speed, but the fact that he forgot even for _that_ long tells her something she didn’t know about him, and about what he’ll do for the people he wants to protect. More quietly, he says, “You don’t know what it does to him, coming here over and over and seeing the way you look at him, and he says you try to hide it but I figure you’re good enough that if you wanted it hidden—”

“I’m just like you,” Natasha cuts him off, voice low for just his ears. His face doesn’t wear incomprehension well— _It’s probably not something he’s used to feeling_ , Natasha thinks, not meanly—but she can read it well enough, and she goes on before he can try to push back. “I don’t have any superpowers and I don’t come from some planet of godlike super-beings. If you take off my armor, there’s nothing but a flesh-and-blood human being underneath. I do know what it does to him, and I do try, Stark. And Dr. Banner knows that it’s not _him_ I’m afraid of. But it has to be me, because there’s no one else I trust to survive it, if he loses control.”

“You so sure _you_ would make it?” Stark says – it’s not a dig. Curiosity was almost the first thing she learned to read on his face, and it’s still the expression that’s most at home there.

Natasha shrugs, and gives him the honest answer. “I stand a better chance than any other woman I know. And if I _don’t_ make it, then at least I don’t have to live with having sent some other woman in there to die.”

“Why does it have to be a woman?”

Natasha weighs this for a minute. She’s so used to everyone she knows already having read her file that she has to step for a second into the skin of a normal person, with secrets they’re allowed to keep. “If Dr. Banner wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

For whatever reason, Natasha can see that won her some kind of point. There’s a moment of quiet where they both size each other up. Stark repeats, calm this time but still intense, “He deserves to be able to spar with someone who’s not terrified of him, every once in a while.”

“The gym is reinforced?”

Stark snorts. “Like Fort Knox, Assassin Barbie, but, you know, about a thousand times better, because it’s _me_. I like Bruce a lot, but I’m pretty fond of Stark Tower, too.”

“Good.” Natasha nods. “I’ll tell Dr. Banner he has authorization to spar with you when I see him at tomorrow’s lesson.” Then she knees Stark in the groin – not as hard as she could, but hard enough. “And that’s for calling me Assassin Barbie,” she tells his prone and moaning form, and walks away.

***

In the dark, in Natasha’s bed, Clint is confessing his sins. He’s glad, as always, for the blanketing dark in the bedroom – he’s not sure he could say this stuff with the light on his face. He can see well enough to know where Natasha is, but not so well that he feels exposed, pinned down like an insect. Haltingly, he continues. “He asked about everyone—strengths and weaknesses, pressure points—but with you, it… it was different. The kinds of things he wanted me to say, they were personal—“

“Sexual.” She doesn’t sound surprised.

“Yeah.” Clint squeezes his eyes shut, breathes out. He’s alone in his head now. He is. “He had some messed-up ideas about women, Nat.”

“I know.”

Clint freezes, fear like a spike of ice through his heart. “He didn’t—”

“No. But during the interrogation, he said some things—”

Heartsick, Clint says again, “I’m sorry—”

She shakes her head. “Not about my past. Like at the beginning—you’ve seen the tape, I assume…”

“No.”

Natasha pauses for a moment. Clint can tell she wants to ask him about it, but what she says is, “He said he was expecting me to be the honey trap – to show up after the torture and offer him comfort, a balm…”

“ _You_?” Clint asks, flabbergasted.

Natasha gives him a look that says, _I know_.

“But all the things I told him about you…” Clint says, totally bewildered.

“I know.”

Clint still can’t wrap his head around it. “How you operate, what you are, what you’re capable of…”

“I know.”

“Jesus.” There’s crazy and then there’s _crazy_.

Natasha says calmly, “On some level, he couldn’t believe that a woman could be all the things you told him I was.”

Clint absorbs that, then says the first thing that comes into his head. “What a shithead.”

He starts laughing, and Natasha joins him, and then both of them are cracking up, at first a little uneasily, then harder.

“To _comfort_ him, are you shitting me?” Clint asks, almost giggling now.

Natasha smiles and rolls her head back, resting it against the side of the bed. “You know that time in Vladivostok…”

Coulson had loved telling this story. “Where the Ten Rings had me in that compound, and you had to rescue me without backup—”

“Yes. And I had set the bomb on the timer, and when the explosion went off—”

Clint picks up the thread. “All the interrogators were circled around me, and they asked me what the hell that was, and I told them the truth, that you were coming for me…”

“And they didn’t know too many English words, so you had to say…”

Grinning, Clint repeats, “ _Chornaya vdava_. Holy shit, the looks on their faces.”

“Comfort. Those were looks of comfort,” Natasha says, innocent as an angel.

“Yes, ma’am,” Clint says. “They were so fucking comforted they shit their pants.”

The pair of them descend into laughter again, laughing until Clint’s sides are sore from it.

When the laughter peters out, Natasha says, “He called me a cunt, too.”

Clint stares. “You’re shitting me.”

“Not literally. In RenFaire-speak. I had to look it up to be sure, but I could tell by the way he said it.”

“What a complete piece of shit,” Clint says, disgusted, and he’s amazed to realize that he’s talking about the man that had brainwashed and used him, held absolute power over him, the way that he’d talk about a jerk who asked Natasha if the carpet matched the drapes.

“And then he talked about my ledger _gushing red—_ ”

Clint’s eyes go wide with disbelief. “No.”

“Yes,” Natasha says, enjoying herself. “Menstrual, much?”

They crack up again, feeding off of each other’s laughter until Clint has to wipe his eyes. Every time they start to wind down, one of them will lose it again and set the other one off. It feels like five minutes have passed by the time they settle into sporadic chuckles. Natasha’s head is turned toward him, enough that her hair is brushing his cheek, and her mouth is curved in a deep, honest smile. He wants to kiss her so fucking much.

Like always, he shoves it down. Shaking his head, he says, “Messed-up ideas about women, no fucking kidding. That stupid motherfucker.” That’s a new thought, and it’s a thought Clint likes. Not all-powerful, not all-knowing, but a stupid misogynistic dickwad who’d underestimated Natasha Goddamn Romanoff, even after he’d been specifically warned. “If I’d put an arrow in his eye, I do think I’d be sleeping better. But knowing that you fucked him dry helps some, too.”

Natasha inclines her head graciously. “It was my pleasure.”

“You out-lied the god of lies for me,” Clint realizes. “I think that’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever done for me.”

Natasha shrugs and avoids his eyes, uncomfortable. “It was luck. If you’re going to be brainwashed by insane gods with daddy issues, try and make sure to get brainwashed by insane gods in my areas of specialty. The god of stealth would work – the god of hunting would probably be fine. If you get brainwashed by the god of open and honest discussions about feelings, you’re fucked.”

That starts them off again, even though Clint thinks that he probably shouldn’t be laughing at brainwashing jokes yet, but what the hell. That’s Natasha – she’s not in the business of pulling punches against people who can take it. Clint knows he’s not always one of those people right now, but he always wants to be. He wants to be right here, right now, forever, with the most beautiful woman in the world shaking with laughter against his shoulder, her lips a breath away from his. He wants to kiss her, again – it’s even worse this time, and when she leans back again, he thinks maybe she sees it in his eyes. He looks down, says, “We should sleep.”

***

When Ms. Potts shows up for her individual hand-to-hand lesson on Wednesday, Natasha can tell she has something on her mind. Knowing Ms. Potts as well as she does, Natasha ignores it and conducts the lesson as usual. She can wait.

Halfway through the lesson, Natasha knocks Ms. Potts down for about the twentieth time today, and as she picks herself up off the mat, Ms. Potts says abruptly, “May I ask you something rude and entirely none of my business?”

“With an introduction like that, how can I say no?” Natasha deadpans.

Ms. Potts doesn’t say anything, watching Natasha politely.

“Yes,” Natasha says.

“You didn’t have to—sleep with Tony, for the assignment, back when you came to Stark Industries... did you?”

“No.”

Pepper’s smile of relief is small, but it changes her whole face. “I’m glad to hear that. I know this must sound naïve, but I… I liked Phil. And I didn’t like to think of him—making you do that.”

It is naïve. But sweet, in a way. Natasha keeps her face blank, and doesn’t say, _I thought you wanted to make sure I hadn’t fucked your boyfriend_. Or, _He liked you, too. I think you were the only friend he had who didn’t work for him_.

Instead she says, perfectly truthfully, “There are handlers who plan missions on the assumption that the shortest distance between two points is between their female asset’s legs. Coulson wasn’t like that. And he didn’t like handlers who were.” That never stopped him from giving the order, when it was necessary. He was a professional, and he knew Natasha was a professional, too. But he wasn’t lazy about it. And he fired the first SHIELD handler who assigned her to fuck a target just because it was easy. There weren’t any others, after that.

***

Open sparring has petered out early, as it tends to do on weekends, and Natasha and Rogers are the only ones left in the gym – they’re taking a break between rounds. A week ago, the gym wouldn’t have cleared out until one of them left, but the novelty value of watching Captain America and the Black Widow kick the shit out of each other recreationally has mostly worn off.

“Does it bother you, working with me and Agent Barton?” Natasha asks, idly.

“Why?” Rogers looks confused. “Because you’re, uh… because you two are—an item?”

Natasha considers a few reactions and decides on amusement. All she says is, “Clint and I are not an item.”

“Oh.” He blushes, and casts his eyes down. “But—why would I have a problem with the two of you?”

“Because of what we do – what we _are_. Killers.”

“I’ve killed a fair number of men myself. I don’t fool myself I’ve got the right to judge anybody else on that score – or any other.”

“But you were a soldier, fighting a war.”

Rogers gives her a cynical shadow of a smile. “If I learned anything about the seventy years I was asleep, it’s this: there’s always a war.”

“That bothers you.”

He thinks about that for a little while, looking into the middle distance. “It’s not what I thought I was fighting for,” he says in the end.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s not your war. You just fight in it. Better someone like you, or Agent Barton, than someone without principles, or someone who kills because… they like it.”

“You think Agent Barton and I have principles?” Natasha asks, smiling.

“I know it.”

***

When Stark shows up after the women’s group hand-to-hand lesson, Natasha assumes he’s there to pick up Ms. Potts – unfortunately, Ms. Potts leaves without him, albeit not without giving him a brief stern talking-to. That means that, however little Natasha likes it, Stark must be here to talk to her. She walks over to stand in front of him, and settles in to wait him out.

After a long and awkward silence, Stark says, “So it’s been brought to my attention that… So Pepper is CEO.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” Natasha isn’t sure where this is going, but she’s quite sure she has things to do today that don’t involve listening to Tony Stark admire the sound of his own voice.

Stark narrows his eyes. “Look, Agent Romanoff, I’m about to apologize, which I do only about once a decade, so it’s a pretty momentous event, and it needs a preface or a prologue – I was never one hundred percent sure what the difference is…”

“You were apologizing?” Natasha reminds him, bored already.

“So she’s CEO, and she’s CEO because she’s the smartest, toughest, most organized and responsible and business-savvy woman—person—I’ve ever met, no offense to present company intended—”

“None taken.”

“And _you_ know that, and _I_ know that, and _she_ knows that, but every time the press remembers that she exists, they always call her my ‘girlfriend and CEO,’ always ‘girlfriend’ first, which is not an accident, or imply-slash-say-outright that she got the job because she’s hot and/or sleeping with me, which, _no_.”

Stark’s face settles into a look of sharp irritation, lips thinned for a split-second before he opens his mouth to keep talking.

“And it makes me crazy, because they’re trying to make her—smaller. Less than her magnificent Pepper self, throwing her actual _skills_ and _accomplishments_ in the dumpster like they can’t count for anything compared with her tits and nice shiny hair, which is total sexist bullshit—”

Natasha raises an eyebrow.

“I see your eyebrow raise, and I assume it’s an eyebrow raise of Stark-you-hypocrite-that’s-what-you-did-to-me, which, yes, I know, that’s my point here.” Stark stops for breath, which she wasn’t sure was ever going to happen. “It was pointed out to me that I maybe at one point in our relationship treated you like a walking pair of tits and hired you as my PA because I wanted to stare at something pretty all day long and not because you were insanely qualified and spoke seven languages—probably you’re up to eight or nine by now—and so basically I shouldn’t have done to you the things that make me buy TV stations and fire all their anchors when they do it to Pepper. So I—I.” He stops for breath again. Or for courage. She’s not sure which. “Iplgize.” He looks insanely uncomfortable. She lets him hang.

Like he can’t help himself, he says, “In my defense—”

_Here we go_ , Natasha thinks.

“—there were underwear model photos, and it wasn’t even you, it was some fake made-up person from Legal who, again, had underwear model photos, and you were infiltrating my company and spying on me, so your hands aren’t exactly clean here, either – although really that’s more Fury’s fault, so I guess I should go walk by his office and sexually objectify _him_. But the point is that I was set up. In my defense, it wouldn’t have worked if I didn’t act like a pig, your whole little infiltration wouldn’t have worked otherwise—”

“You don’t have to live down to other people’s low expectations,” Natasha points out, simply.

For a long second, Stark looks off balance, like he put his foot down expecting floor and found air. He asks, “If I don’t live down to people’s expectations, how will the world know it’s me?” She can tell it was supposed to be a joke, but it came out more sincere than he intended, and now he can’t meet her eyes.

“The glowing thing in your chest might be a clue.”

Stark pauses. “Point,” he concedes.

There’s an awkward pause.

“So are you apologizing, or…”

“I am. I mean. I apologize.”

She leaves him to hang again. This time, he keeps his mouth shut.

“Apology accepted.”

“It is? Of course it is.”

Another awkward pause ensues.

Tony points at the doorway. “Can I go?”

“I wish you would.”

***

In the dark, in Natasha’s bed, Natasha asks, “What are you scared of?” and under cover of darkness, Clint spits, “Him.”

“Loki?”

“No. Not Loki.” He thinks that’s the first time he’s said Loki’s name to her. “Loki’s… Me. Me when I was his.”

Natasha waits silently, face neutral; he knows it’s an interrogation technique, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work on him.

Clint says, “Lots of things were the same – the target, the sight, the things I knew—things I knew about you—”

“Don’t.”

“—about Coulson… I had heart, he said, and he liked that. So he kept it. When my—when everything else but what he could use got carved out to make room for what _he_ put in there, _that_ he kept. Heart. Heart for the fight.”

Clint swallows. If he doesn’t get this out now, maybe he never will, so he makes himself say, “I used to wish for that, you know? To be nothing but the bow and the mission and the will to fight. Then I got it, but it wasn’t me, it was him, and he told Loki every little thing that it damn near killed you to trust me with, and he killed a dozen people I used to spar with and get coffee with and stand in the elevator with, and he knelt down in front of that psycho freak bastard and he loved it, he _loved_ it.”

Clint breaks off, breathing heavily. “And that’s still in my head.” He shudders violently. “ _He’s_ still in my head. Every fucking second of every fucking day. And I can say ‘he’ all I want, but I know he’s _me_. That stuff he felt – that _joy_ he felt, that’s part of _me_. It’s... sick.”

Natasha’s still quiet, and it rubs Clint the wrong way, makes him feel used. He taunts, “Not gonna tell me he’s gone? Not gonna tell me—“

“No.” Natasha stands up, and for a minute Clint’s heart is in his throat, sure that this is the time he’s pushed her too far, this is the time she gives up on him—

But she just says, “Follow me,” and walks out of the bedroom, not looking to see if he’s behind her. She leads him up the elevator, through the hallways to the small gym – closes the door and locks it behind her. He thinks they’re going to spar, but she leans back against the door. After a second, he joins her.

Looking up at the ceiling, she takes in a slow, considering breath. “You know that Red Room created... layers of personalities in me.”

“Yeah,” Clint says, not sure why she couldn’t have told him this in the bedroom.

“And you know that Natalia Romanova was the most persistent personality, the default that covered up the Black Widow, the quasi-blank slate onto which the others were added.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you remember who she was?”

Clint hadn’t been around much for the first deprogramming, but he’d read the reports. “She was a ballerina who joined the KGB.”

Natasha nods. “Yes.” She steps away from him, into the center of the gym. “You know that she was a whitewash personality, imposed over the personality I’d grown up with – she was never real. Natalia Romanova was a holding pattern, and she was the last one to be stripped away in the deprogramming.” Natasha drops into the splits, starts stretching. Clint flexes his fingers against his arms, itchy and impatient. Eventually Natasha gets up from the floor and walks over to meet his eyes. “There was nothing real about her,” Natasha says, with a powerful intensity. “ _Nothing_.” And then she closes her eyes.

*

Natasha blows out a breath, holding first position. On the way to the gym, she’d thought about it: _Swan Lake_ is tempting, the dark side and the light; _Sleeping Beauty_ , finally waking up. She knows Swanhilde’s solo from _Coppélia_ by heart—the flesh-and-blood girl pretending to be an emotionless doll to save the man she loves from the enchanter’s spell—but she’s danced that one for Clint already, even though he wasn’t there to see it. So Natasha abandons allegory: her body knows the dance it wants to do, and she inhales once, deeply, before opening her eyes starting the _Danse de l’Oiseau de feu_.

She barely had time to stretch, but her body knows this choreography so well. She gives herself to the opening _grand jetes_ , taking satisfaction in the thud of her feet against the floor. Her arms curve and cup the air as if they truly are wings, and she sends her legs leaping higher, _higher_ , because the audience will believe a woman can fly only if the ballerina believes it herself. She’s a creature of air and fire, hands flickering like flames, and she can’t pause, can’t settle, any more than the wind can. Every time a foot touches the floor, it’s a brief alighting, never planted.

There’s no music, of course, but she can hear Stravinsky’s beautiful strangeness in her head, just like she can hear the harsh instructions of Mme. Nossova, Natalia’s ballet instructor, who probably didn’t exist, and who taught Natalia to push past exhaustion until her muscles burned like red-hot pokers. Natasha turns and turns, never losing track of her audience, and she feels the glorious line of intention from the crown of her head to her pointed toes. The Firebird isn’t anyone’s lover; isn’t anyone sister, or mother, or victim, or pawn, or nemesis, or nightmare. Her arms bend around the currents of the air, and she inclines her head, birdlike, to hear no sound but music. She speaks no lies. She pleases no one with her body but herself. She is purely, beautifully alive. And Natasha is alive there with her – she, too, is flame and flight. This, more than anything Natasha has ever felt, is freedom.

At the end of the dance, she comes to a stop, panting, in front of Clint. Natasha lowers her arms, relaxes her weight down off of her toes, but that’s just distraction. She looks him straight in the eye, willing him to understand.

Looking back, Clint says, “I shot Agent Spezza in the head. You remember her – she was the requisition officer when you first started out. The one who gave you your belt buckle, and never complained when you turned your gear in bloody. She made field agent last year. She was so goddamn proud. She sent me a card, thanking me for being so great to work with and saying she’d trained up a really good replacement for us. I bet she sent you one, too. It was a tricky shot – I banked a ricochet around a right angle just by sound, no reflection to work off of. I remember how that made me feel, making a shot like that. Proud. I think I smiled, making that shot. Her brains were all over the floor.” His face is hard, lined – nothing could get through that face, Natasha thinks. When she doesn’t react, he sneers. “Mine aren’t so pretty as yours,” he says, flat, and walks out of the gym.

After he’s gone, Natasha leans her back against the wall and tips her head back.

_Well, that was stupid_ , she thinks. She should have known better. She _did_ know better. She has no talent for putting things back together – no talent for healing, for mending, for truth-telling when there’s nothing she wants to get out of it afterward. But attachment makes people stupid, and she’s no exception. She knew and she didn’t care.

Tomorrow morning, she knows, Clint will be back to normal, cracking eggs and jokes, helping plan the final self-defense lessons. She won’t try this again.

*

Natasha extends her hand to Dr. Foster, helping her up from the mat after the last series of throws. When Dr. Foster makes it to her feet, Natasha nods and says, “All right. You’re done.”

“Done?”

“You… graduate.” Natasha holds her gaze. “Keep up your sparring—with Darcy, or you can come to open sparring here at SHIELD, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends at two o’clock—and I will know if you don’t. But lessons are over.”

“Oh!” Dr. Foster flushes, surprised. Natasha can see her running things through in her mind, going over the lessons and realizing how much better she was now than when she started. She nods, and then suddenly grins up at Natasha. “Do I get a diploma?”

Allowing herself a quirk of a smile, Natasha replies, “I think you probably have enough of those.”

More seriously, Dr. Foster meets Natasha’s eyes, and holds out her hand. “Thank you, Agent Romanoff.”

“Natasha,” Natasha says, reaching out and shaking Dr. Foster’s hand firmly, feeling the new strength in her grip.

“Thank you, Natasha,” Dr. Foster corrects, looking pleased. “And please call me Jane.”

“You’re welcome, Jane.”

******************************************************************************************************

Clint waits. When Dr. Foster is three feet from the locker room, he pulls the mask down over his face and drops. She’s too slow turning to face him to stop him from wrapping his arm around her neck, but her training kicks in and she plants her elbow in his stomach with enough force to send him backward. She spins to deliver a sharp kick to his kneecap, and he sees it flash across her face – she thought he was Nat, that this was a test, and now she’s knows it’s a man, she’s not sure. As he dodges the kick and sends a roundhouse to the side of her head, he recognizes the timing is suspicious, coming right out of her last lesson, and she’s smart enough that he’s going to have to convince her she’s wrong sooner rather than later. She blocks the punch and takes advantage of her small size to dart under his reach, aiming for his gut; he twists to the side and brings his knee up into her face, hard, pulling it only enough to be sure he won’t break her cheekbone, and she can’t suppress the cry of pain and shock. That _hurt_ , Clint knows, more than she’s been hurt in training normally, and he sees a real flicker of doubt in her eyes.

She recovers well, trying a kick to the back of his knee, but he’s ten times too fast for that – without looking, he just grabs her ankle and _yanks_ , and when she tries to regain her balance, he lands a sharp punch right on her sternum that knocks the wind out of her and plants her on the ground. If this were a lesson, he’d give her a chance to get up; if this were a sparring match, he’d try to kick her and she’d try to block him or roll away. He doesn’t do either of those things. He crouches down, holds her wrists above her head with one hand, and puts his knee between her thighs.

Clint’s taught hand-to-hand to women before, and it still amazes him, this change in Dr. Foster’s eyes – the raw terror that rises up and chokes out rationality, that strips away every hint of her humor, her intelligence, her _person_. He and Nat never taught her any headbutt moves, but her forehead meets his nose so fast that it would be a broken wreck if he hadn’t seen this coming.

He allows it to push him off of her anyway, because _this_ is the real test. She tries to run for the locker room—good, she’s still got the sense to run—but he grabs her by the hair and pulls her past him, switching places so he’s between her and the locker room, and landing a punch to her spine for good measure.

The idea now is to try to push her against any flat surface, keep feeding the fear. He herds her toward the west wall, but it’s harder now, her reflexes in overdrive, coming at him in a flurry of sharp but badly timed blows. Her speed is better, but her accuracy is down, and he doesn’t even need to bother parrying most of the blows. He’s playing with her, lazy like a cat with a mouse between its paws, and that scares her most of all – he can see her face go white when she realizes it. He snags her wrist, easily, twisting it almost to the point of a sprain, then pulling it up behind her, and giving a shove with all his body weight behind it, pins her face-first against the wall. Her breath is quick in and out, like a rabbit’s, and her whole body is shuddering with fear. She tries the elbow trick again, but it’s child’s play to trap her left arm, too, and to knee her thighs far enough apart that she has no leverage for a kick, although he knows she reads his move as something else. He leans in close, pressing his body against hers from neck to knee, and waits—waits to see if she’ll sag against the wall like a puppet with cut strings—but she doesn’t, and he smiles. _Good_. If this were a real attack, that means she’d still be in combat mode, ready to take advantage of any slip he might make. Nat’s training worked, worked its way inside her head and remade her instincts into something she can use. He lets go and steps back, and when Dr. Foster whirls around, he pulls the mask off of his face, and says her name.

It takes a minute for sense to come back into her eyes, and while the minute passes, Clint can see every thought travel across her face. _It was a test after all. Was it? No, it was. It was._ He can see how badly she wants to just sit down on the floor and sob for a good few minutes, just to unwind all the tension wrapped around her bones; he can see the way her gaze hardens as she looks at him, thinking _I refuse to give him the satisfaction_.

Finally, she says, as calmly as she can, “That was an incredibly shitty thing to do.”

“I know,” Clint replies, but he doesn’t say he’s sorry, because he’d do it again.

“Why?” Dr. Foster asks.

Clint hunches his shoulders inward and tries to explain, knowing that she may not accept it. He wouldn’t blame her. He says, “Because you _will_ react differently when you know it’s for real. And you _will_ react differently when your attacker is a man. And you need to be prepared for that. It will change the way you fight.”

Dr. Foster stares at him. “Prepared _how_?”

“Right now, while it’s still fresh in your mind, you should try to go back over it,” Clint asks – he uses his teaching voice, but he’s careful not to make it an order.

Her eyes focus in the middle distance, remembering. “At first, I thought it was a test.”

Clint nods. “The timing.”

“Yes.” Dr. Foster takes a deep shuddering breath, in and out. “So is the lesson that I should never assume anything is just a test?”

She knows better, Clint can tell, but she wants to go home, or at least get away from _him_.

“That’s _a_ lesson,” he allows. Natasha is better at this. But she was right, it has to be him. “But that’s not all. You thought it was a test. When did that change?”

She doesn’t want to say it. Clint waits her out, and she steels herself and makes herself keep talking.

“You held me down,” she forces out, voice shaking and embarrassed by it – she won’t meet his eyes, but he can feel her anger through his skin, anger at him but more at herself. She wants to be better than this, but there _is_ no “better,” and Clint _knows_ that, and suddenly he feels it like a shockwave – he _knows_. He knows it so well. The words come out, but now _he_ doesn’t want to be here either, he wants to run, he wants to—

“And why was that different?” She looks up at him with terrible fury, helpless and hating it, and he recognizes her, in that terrible nauseating way that came out of nowhere. He recognizes this whole dance and he could say it for her, he could spare her.

“Because I thought…” She has to stop and pull together another try. “Because I thought you were going to rape me,” she says, and recoils from the word ‘you’ and the word ‘me’ even as they pass her lips – there is no minimum safe distance, not from any of the words she said. Her lips pull away from the syllables like they burn her.

“And why did that change your reactions?” Clint chokes out—keep it together, fucking keep it together, Barton, this isn’t _about_ you...

“Because I was afraid,” she says, harsh and vicious, an indictment. “Because I was afraid, I was terrified, I was like a deer in the headlights—” The words tumble out like rocks down a hill, jagged, and tears gather in her eyes but don’t fall.

“But you weren’t,” Clint interrupts, because this is important. He leans down a little to meet her eyes—still keeping his distance—and repeats. “You _weren’t_ a deer in the headlights. You didn’t leave your head. Not even at the end, when you were immobilized. You _kept fighting_.”

“Do you think that makes me _better_?” she snarls, tears finally spilling out of the corners of her eyes. “Does that make it _all right_ , somehow? You were playing with me, you could have done anything to me—”

“It _is_ important. It’s important because—if it hadn’t been me, if this were real, if I were—” Clint almost chokes on the irony, but he keeps going. “—if I were brainwashed by Loki and sent here to hurt you, in—in every way he knows you fear, and he has a pretty specific idea of what women fear— _you would have survived_. You would have kept fighting, and kept your eyes open, and when the split-second chance came, you would have been ready to take it.”

“Survived… But I would still have been…”

“If Loki had sent someone after you tonight, someone with good training, and you’d been alone, then maybe,” Clint says, as gently as he can, knowing there are no words gentle enough for this. “You maybe would have been—” He made her say it, so he can damn well say it, too. “You might have been raped. And maybe hurt in other ways, before you escaped. But this is the really important thing – when the danger comes, and it’s going to come, someday, you’re going to be _ready_. You know how it feels now, you know your own reactions and weaknesses and most of all, you know your own fear. You were afraid, tonight, and yeah, you’ll always be afraid – you’ll never get over it, but you can get _past_ it. You can learn to fight _with_ it, you can—you can get to a point where it’ll always be there, but it doesn’t—doesn’t strip away who you are anymore. You can get to a point where you know it’s still you underneath.” His eyes are blurred with tears, spilling over onto his cheeks, and he doesn’t see it coming when Dr. Foster cups her small hand over his shoulder and says to him, with compassion he doesn’t deserve, “Yes. You can.”

And after all this time, all the therapy and the nightmares and falling asleep to the sound of Natasha’s breathing, Clint breaks down and cries. Dr. Foster starts crying, too, letting all of the fear and anger and tension shake itself out in quiet sobs into the sleeve of his shirt. The two of them gradually sink down to the floor, side by side, crying without shame or restraint, and even though he’s so much bigger than she is, Clint feels like he’s leaning on her, not the other way around. Clint lets himself weep until he’s emptied out, light and aching and somehow clean.

When they’re both cried out, Dr. Foster pulls away and looks him in the eyes.

“That was still an unbelievably shitty thing to do,” she says.

“It was,” Clint agrees. Natasha said it was necessary, and he trusts her, but if he were Dr. Foster, he’d never want to speak to either of them ever again.

But instead, Dr. Foster nods, still holding his gaze, and says, “I forgive you.”

Clint knows he doesn’t deserve that, but he’s grateful for it anyway – he’d liked getting to know her through their small arms lessons, and he admires her now more than ever. “Thank you.”

“I forgive Agent Romanoff, too.”

“Thank you.”

Dr. Foster climbs to her feet and squares her shoulders. “I’m going to go home and hug my assistant, now.”

“Sounds good,” Clint says.

***********************************************************************************

Natasha had been expecting to hear from Clint about Dr. Foster’s final training session, so she’s surprised when her phone blinks with a message from Fury, instead, summoning her to his office. When she gets there, Fury is in his chair, one ankle on the opposite knee, fingers steepled in front of him. “Agent Romanoff.”

“Sir?” she asks.

“Barton’s off the reservation. You have any intel on that?”

Natasha nods. “Yes, sir – I remember he said he was getting a little cabin fever, needed some space. Thought he might head out for a few hours.” That’s a complete lie, and Fury knows it’s a complete lie, but plausible deniability is the name of the game here.

Fury eyeballs her, but says finally, “Taking a SHIELD jet up to some godforsaken mountain in upstate New York seems like a pretty strong reaction to a little cabin fever. You might want to say as much, when you go get him.”

Natasha can take a hint. “Yes, sir,” she says, then calls Maria to ask for a driver to drop her off upstate.

***

When Clint climbs back down to the jet, Natasha is sitting on the nose, still as the trees.

“Bet I scared the shit out of everyone,” he says when he gets close enough to see her face.

“Not me.” She’s watching him, patient. The patient watch isn’t Natasha’s way – Clint is the one who waits. But she waited for him.

He takes a few steps closer, and when he’s standing below the nose of the jet, she leaps down, landing as gracefully as a cat. She straightens up and meets his eyes, still waiting. Clint could describe her face for a report or a profile, or a sketch for her file. But he couldn’t describe her to himself except in this way: a flame, a hunter in the woods, a racing heartbeat, a shadow’s shadow. She’s more than he’ll ever be. But he thinks she might want something from him anyway. He thinks they might be two of a kind after all.

She lets him take her hand, her left in his right; his fingertips are rough and hard from the bowstring, but her calluses are more varied – gun, knife, garrote. Two bloody hands, when all is said and done. But he thinks hers are beautiful.

“It takes me some time to work things through,” he says, still studying their hands. “I’m sorry for that.”

“No need,” she tells him. Not true, but he’ll take it.

Clint looks up, meets her eyes in the shadow of the trees, and smiles. Quietly, he asks, “Dance with me?”

Natasha smiles back like a long exhale before breathing clean air again. He can’t dance like she can, but they both learned most social dances; he rests his left hand on her waist, feels her right settle on his shoulder, a bird alighting, and he falls into a waltzing rhythm, here in the clearing on the edge of the woods.

He starts humming an old song he first heard when he was just a boy, sitting around a fire after the last show of the night. Laureen the trick rider had a beat-up guitar, and she’d play it by the fire and sing these slow, sad old tunes. _I remember the night, and the Tennessee Waltz_ , she sang, sweet and low, _Now I know just how much I have lost_. She was the first woman he ever loved: her husband was the horse trainer and he blacked her eye every time he drank, and Clint had known he was going to take her away from all that and make it so she was never sad again. He’d been twelve. She and her husband left the circus six months later – she’d left Clint her guitar and a note that smelled like her perfume.

Clint’s voice is rough and he hasn’t heard the song in years, but it keeps time just fine. In the midst of the dance, he summons up whatever daring he still has in the dregs of his heart, and meets Natasha’s lips with his own, just for a moment. Without losing their rhythm, Natasha leans in, and kisses him with more than just a polite reply. Her hand on his shoulder comes to rest at the back of his neck, and he almost wants to laugh, because there’s no part of him that could ever want to pull away. She’s the one who breaks the kiss, and they finally come to a standstill, breathing each other’s breath.

“I thought love was for children,” he murmurs.

“It _is_. We’re—what we have is… It’s—sinew, and muscle, and blood—”

“Love’s in the heart,” Clint says. He knows what she’s trying to say. “You’re in my right arm, my bow hand, my fingers on the bowstring—”

“You’re my trigger finger,” she whispers, and Clint’s on fire.

*

As Natasha and Clint are walking out of the hangar after returning the plane, Natasha’s communicator goes off. She answers it, and Maria is on the other end, saying her name with a voice tight with tension.

“Natasha.”

Natasha motions for Clint to stop and answers, “Maria.”

Sounding unsettled, Maria says, “Someone tripped the alarm I set on Coulson’s office door.”

“Who?” Natasha asks.

“Banner.”

“Mm.” That’s unexpected. “Let me handle this one.”

Maria protests, “You should have back-up.”

Walking through the corridors toward Coulson’s office, Natasha asks, “Do you really think that would do any good?”

Maria’s silence says it all.

“Let me handle this one,” Natasha repeats, and Maria gives the affirmative. She turns to Clint to explain, but Clint shakes his head.

“I’ll meet you back at your quarters,” he says. There’s no need for apologies between them – they both know how this life works. When the mission calls, that’s it. Natasha nods and kisses Clint briefly on the lips before continuing on without him.

When she reaches the office, the door is ajar. She knocks, then enters without waiting for permission.

“Tony is a good friend,” Banner says. He’s behind Coulson’s desk, facing the door, but hunched over slightly, enough to hide his face in shadow. The desk is still covered with the same neat stacks of paper Coulson left there when he died.

“He is,” Natasha replies, waiting. She doesn’t make a move toward the light switch.

“He gets me all the nicest presents.” As Banner turns toward her, she can see that he’s holding something in his hands – a file. “And it’s not even my birthday.”

“What did he find?”

“It was on the servers, but I thought it had to be—out of date, or some mad scientist’s pet project, not an official SHIELD plan—“ Banner’s voice is getting louder, still apparently calm, but the words are tumbling out faster, “—so I came here. Coulson seemed… I liked him. We all liked him. I thought there’d be a big red stamp – ‘DENIED’ or, I don’t know, ‘CRAZY,’ do you guys have a stamp that says ‘CRAZY’?”

“What is it, Dr. Banner?”

“Or maybe one that says, ‘EVIL’—”

“Dr. Banner, I need you to tell me what’s—”

“I told Fury he’d already rented my room. I should have known,” Banner says as he offers her the file, mouth twisting, eyes shading wild, too wild. “I may not think much of their morals, but they’re not short of hospitality.”

“Rooms and rooms,” Natasha murmurs, accepting the file and holding it in the bar of light coming through the open door from the hallway.

Banner laughs – it’s not a comforting sound. He seems bigger, in the dark. Natasha focuses on the file in her hands.

The first page is a plan for incapacitating the Hulk – it won’t work, Natasha can see at a glance, but that won’t have made Banner angry anyway; he has his own plans in place, she suspects. The next page looks very familiar. There’s a project team assembled, and a facility, brand-new and tucked in the green hills of Pennsylvania, for programming and conditioning. Dr. Banner’s conscious control over the Hulk is useful now, now that he plays along. But SHIELD has contingencies built on contingencies, and they captured an enemy agent once whose programming they think they can reverse-engineer. The Hulk under SHIELD’s conscious control, summoned by a trigger phrase or image rather than some human’s unpredictable, imperfect willpower. Red Room’s agents were broken, damaged people, but you couldn’t deny that they were wonderfully reliable. _Yes_ , Natasha thinks, _very familiar_.

The facility is already complete, empty like a hungry mouth, waiting for its guest—its raison d’etre—to arrive someday. Like a bride waiting at the altar, it’s beautiful. There are pictures. Gleaming floors, gleaming tabletops, gleaming metal bars and needles.

Natasha shuts the file. Quietly, she says, “I’m not going to let that happen.”

“That’s funny.” Banner’s voice is low, almost a growl, and there’s something funny about his eyes, gleaming in the dark. “I could swear I’ve heard you tell me that before—”

“I said, I’m not going to let that happen to you,” Natasha repeats, louder, “and I will _kill_ anyone who tries.”

“Is that supposed to—” Banner breaks off, looking at her. Seconds tick by, and his eyes stay fixed on her in the dim light, as the fear and anger slowly wash out of them. Finally, sounding small and amazed, almost like a child, he whispers, “You’re not afraid. You’re not afraid of me.”

Natasha scans her own reactions. “I’m not,” she acknowledges.

“Huh.” Dr. Banner comes around the desk, flicks on the light, then leans back on the desk’s edge – he’s staring out the door, but his glance flicks over to her face and he smiles shyly for a moment when he says, “So it works.”

“What works?” Natasha asks, though she thinks she knows.

“If you… if you fight something long enough… you stop being afraid of it. If you face it again and again…”

“I don’t think that’s it.” Natasha perches beside him on the edge of the desk, angled slightly so she can keep an eye on his face.

“No?” he asks, crossing his arms. He’s watching her, too, out of the corner of his eye.

Natasha is silent for a minute, gathering the words. Banner waits, with no sign of impatience. He’s like Clint that way, she thinks. “I think… if you fight something long enough, if you face it again and again – you can choose whether to be afraid of it or not. Some things, you should fear.” She sees the shadow pass over his face, and she can’t say he’s wrong. Her nightmares come from her own dark, too. “You can choose that, instead of being crushed by instinct. And the things that you shouldn’t fear – you can choose to be free of those.” Natasha cups a hand around Banner’s cheek; lets him flinch away. After a second, he hesitantly sets his hand palm-up on the desk, and she laces their fingers together, watching him duck his head to hide a soft smile. “That’s the difference. As far as I’ve learned.”

“I think that’s right,” Banner replies, slowly. “Yeah. I think that’s right.”

They sit in the quiet, breathing in and out, Banner watching a spot on the wall, Natasha watching his face. Eventually he squeezes her fingers gently and gives her a small twist of a grin. “I’m not gonna wind up with an arrow in my ass, am I?” he asks.

Natasha rolls her eyes and stands up, detangling their fingers. She doesn’t ask how he knows – she hasn’t exactly bothered to hide it. “Clint knows better. And if he doesn’t, I’ve knocked sense into his head with a steel bar once – I can do it again.”

“Yeah, but _I’ll_ still have an arrow in my ass.”

“I’m sure you can find one—or two—people in Stark Tower who would be very happy to nurse it back to health.”

Banner blushes furiously, and Natasha allows herself a brief, wicked smile before heading for the door. In the doorway, she turns back and holds his gaze. “Stark and I will destroy it.”

“Thank you.”

***

When Clint wakes up the next morning, he feels a sense of déjà vu: he’s in Natasha’s room in the pitch-dark, and he feels kind of like he’s been run over by a truck.

But the bed he’s come to think of as his is on the other side of the room, and Natasha is wrapped around him instead of stretching on the floor when she murmurs, “Morning, sunshine.”

“Mornin’, darlin’.” The words slip out as natural as breathing.

In a wickedly accurate impression, Natasha asks, “‘Darlin’?”

“Oh, shit,” Clint says, closing his eyes, but she sounds amused when she says, “You can take the boy out of Iowa, but you can’t take the Iowa—”

“I’m sorry,” Clint mumbles, “I _am_ sorry—”

“It’s fine,” Natasha laughs. “It’s… it’s real.” She kisses the corner of his mouth, and then slips out of bed, unselfconsciously naked. Her first stop is to the box of breath mints on her dresser – she pops one and then tosses him the box. “I know your morning breath,” she says firmly. “I’m not kissing that.”

Clint doesn’t argue. As Natasha pulls open her underwear drawer and selects a pair of panties, he studies her. If she wanted him to believe that she was happy, he’d never catch her at it, no matter how miserable she was. But he believes in this – in the way she looks at him out of the corner of her eyes, and the way she hasn’t stopped smiling since he woke up.

“What’s the game plan for today?” he asks her, hoping she’ll say, “spending all day in bed,” although the fact that she’s putting clothes on sort of puts paid to that.

“You get to make your own game plan,” Natasha answers. “I’m going in to the shelter in the late morning, and then Maria and I are going to her girlfriend’s roller derby thing.” She picks yesterday’s jeans up from the floor, frowns at them, and then tosses them in the laundry bin.

“How come I wasn’t invited to the roller derby thing?”

“Because you’re not allowed to attend sporting events with other SHIELD personnel after the Washington Mystics fiasco of two years ago.”

“You mean because Maria hates me.”

“Basically, yes.”

Clint laughs. “So cold,” he says, trying for sad puppy eyes – Natasha snorts when she sees him. She pads over to him and pats his cheek.

“Cheer up. Tomorrow Stark and I are going to rural Pennsylvania to blow some shit up. Want to come along?”

“When have I ever said no to an offer like that?”

Natasha pulls a pair of jeans out of her dresser, and says, “Things change.” Her back is to him, and her tone is carefully neutral.

Clint gets up and walks over to her, and he waits for her to turn around and look him in the eye before saying, “Not this, okay? Not ever.”

He leans in and kisses her, enjoying how normal it feels, how easy. This has been in his blood for so long, and is sunk in him so deep, that he wouldn’t even know how to breathe without loving her. That’s a lot to say in a kiss, but he tries, and when she breaks the kiss, her smile is warm and wide.

“So we’re blowing shit up in rural Pennsylvania,” Clint says, searching around for his own clothes. “I kind of figured they were doing a pretty good job blowing themselves up, with the meth labs and all.”

Natasha rolls her eyes and steps into her jeans. “We’re not blowing up a meth lab, Clint.”

“What are we blowing up, then?”

Natasha is quiet for a minute, zipping her jeans and snagging her bra from a drawer. “A nightmare,” she says finally.

_A nightmare_ , Clint thinks, taking a deep breath in and out. “I like the sound of that.”

“Yeah.” Natasha smiles and pulls him close. “Me too. We can do it together.”

“Plus Stark.”

“Plus Stark,” Natasha agrees, rolling her eyes. “No mission is perfect.” She pulls a blue-checked top over her head, grabs a duffel bag from the living room, and kisses his cheek on her way out the door. “I’ll be back tonight, and we can strategize.”

Following her out to the door, Clint asks hopefully, “Strategize and then... bed?”

Natasha stops, framed in the open doorway. “I don’t see why we can’t do both at the same time,” she says, perfectly straight-faced. When Clint laughs, she blows him a kiss, and then she’s gone. But she’ll be back, and they’ll talk, and they’ll fuck, and tomorrow it’ll be Clint and Natasha versus the nightmares. _Yeah_ , Clint thinks, _I like the sound of that a lot._

 


End file.
